Sony charges fifty bucks for a crapware-free system — Holy crap(ware), Batman! If you've ever gotten a new laptop or desktop, only to turn it on and had time to make a sandwich while it slowly boots up, you know that PC makers can shovel a lot of bloated software onto their systems.

Apple pushing Safari downloads on Windows users — In an apparent bid to rapidly gain share of the online browser market dominated by rival Microsoft, Apple is leveraging its vast iTunes install base to recommend that Windows users also download and install the latest version of its Safari web browser.

LinkedIn, Now For Companies — LinkedIn, the boring social network that won't find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles. — On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve …

Do you have to be in every conversation? — Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb has a good post about how the conversation is leaving blogs and going to Twitter, FriendFeed and other services. More importantly, she touches on a big question: How do you keep up? — Perez then dutifully notes …

Dish Network To Offer Mobile TV Service? — Analysts have been abuzz with speculation over Dish Network Corp's surprise win at the government auction for wireless airwaves that ended this week, speculating that the satellite television company formerly known as Echostar (NSDQ: DISH) …

Facebook Toast? Hot Today, Dead Tomorrow—Like AOL? — For now, Facebook continues to take over the world. Its global traffic is about to blow past MySpace's, its image (and Mark Zuckerberg's) has recovered from the Beacon fiasco, and it has raised a big enough cash pile that it should be able to power through any downturn.

Getting Recommended … On April 1st, we started publishing the best damn term sheet hacks we could find. Why? Because a lot of entrepreneurs ask the same question: … We're trying to make everything we've learned—from other entrepreneurs, investors, and lawyers—readily available.

Twitter's political coming of age? — First YouTube, now Twitter. — In 2006, George Allen destroyed his political future after his infamous “Macaca” crack on the campaign trail made the rounds on YouTube. — Now it turns out that John McCain's campaign has suspended …

Firefox 3: So easy a caveman could do it — Firefox 3 won't be out of beta until the end of June but Mozilla told Reuters yesterday that anyone can go ahead and download the most recent version and run it without worrying too much. It's now stable enough for everyone, not just developers.

AT&T to pay FCC $1.3B down payment — NEW YORK - AT&T says it will pay an initial down payment of $1.3 billion to the Federal Communications Commission for its portion of wireless spectrum licenses it won in a government airwaves auction. — AT&T says it will pay the down payment …